Last week I went to my first game jam and had a great time! Fuse Jam in Bristol. We made a little game where you float around on a boat and you can raise and lower the water level by collecting pluses or minuses dotted around the world.

You can play or download the game that we made here: https://tidalloch.itch.io/tidal-loch

I made the music that plays in the background when you start and quite a lot of the sound effects too, I collaborated on the audio with Starshine Audio.

It’s the first time I’ve ever done any kind of audio work for games and luckily folks were kind enough to help me with implementation in Unity and explaining some of the basics of how that works.

In terms of audio stuff I created the music by making multiple variations of a simple piano loop, made using Kontakt, Tritik’s Krush (which is free and awesome) and Izotopes DDLY that looped seamlessly, and then telling unity to play them in a random order.

The idea was to create the impression of the music being generative, without the serious work involved in doing that properly! I was pretty happy with the result.

In terms of sound design I kept things pretty simple due to time constraints and because my goal for the jam was more to meet people and learn a bit of unity/implementation stuff than imprve my design chops.

I used Collected Transients flusher library quite a lot though, especially for the water drain/fill sounds. Thanks to some of the folks at the jam I’ve now discovered Bitsy so the next mission is to make a little game using that and then learn how to make audio work within it!